Debian Jessie install

Q : What does a play work assistant do on his day off ? ; A install debian Jessie on an old computer.

This is what I spent most of today doing.

My Old Duron 1600 has been sitting under my desk for ages, not doing much. It had a few technical issues which today I decided to tackle.

Firstly it wasn’t booting from the hard disk. I was using a ubuntu cd to boot off that, then select an OS installed on the hard disk to boot. Opening it up I looked at some of the cables and tried different configurations, I eventually swapped out one of the cables for a different one and it then booted up properly from the hard disk.

I tried to install ubuntu server 14.04 from a cdrom, but this started off fine then it was displaying errors which suggested a problem with the cd media.

Not wanting to investigate further, I knew that debian offered a very basic install, so I found the ISO and burnt this to a cd-r. and then installed, selecting ssh server and desktop environment (so I at least have a gui if needed)

Once all this was installed I booted in to the system. As I intend to use this has a headless server I decided to try and set it so that it booted to the console, easier said than done, Jessie uses SystemD, whcih if you are upto date on GNU / Linux is the new replacement for the way init works.

In the old sysv days doing this was as simple as editing /etc/inittab and finding the line for initdefault:5 and replacing with initdefault:3

this is no longer the case. I was asking on IRC and was given some help from melodie and phillw